One of my favorite economic dashboards. It highlights major macro indicators, what direction they are trending, what the typical ranges are, and lets you drill down to explanations of why you should care. Looks like a lot of indicators are finally in the “typical” range.

One of my favorite economic dashboards. It highlights major macro indicators, what direction they are trending, what the typical ranges are, and lets you drill down to explanations of why you should care about these numbers.

I’m not a fan of the Heritage Foundation, and the one time I dug into the data of their Economic Freedom Index I found that they occasionally compare apples and oranges to get around data scarcity – BUT: they do put a large research effort into the report each year. The below interactive map is well executed – but you should drill down to country level data to get a feel for what is really being measured (click on a country, then the “learn more about this country” link that pops up in the lower left. Why this requires two steps I have no idea).

Updated for January: one of my favorite economic dashboards. It highlights major macro indicators, what direction they are trending, what the typical ranges are, and lets you drill down to explanations of why you should care. In other words, it’s a very sleek example of how to graph snapshot data while still providing valuable context.

If you want to know the state of the US economy at any time, check out the below visualizations from Russell Investments and the AP. They are both updated monthly with the latest data, allow all kinds of drilling down, and both take the time to document sources and explain why you should give a shit about these particular numbers (for example, click on any of the “historical details” links on Russell’s dashboard).

A beautiful data visualization of retail sales by type of business. I usually hate stacked bar charts because you really can’t compare what’s happening to any stack except the bottom and the total. The WSJ solves that problem by letting you click on any individual sector, which smoothly animates into a chart of just those bars. Well done! It would be interesting to see this done for the components of GDP.

Update: Philip Izzo pointed out to me that the WSJ’s interactive area chart of the Fed’s balance sheet (below) also allows the same kind of drill-down. In addition, both of these are updated regularly as new data is released.

The World Economic Forum has a number of interactive tools for examining the results of it’s Global Competitiveness Report. You can view the aggregate index or any of the many (very interesting) sub-components as maps, bar charts, scatter plots, rankings, or individual profiles. FYI – The United States has slipped from 2nd to 4th overall.